Figures in Silk (37 page)

She would see Dickon again.

Jane was changed—wounded, quiet, prayerful—but at least she was free. Dickon had kept his word. The thought filled her with joy; it was all she could do to keep it from her sister, who spent her days dozing in the bed they were sharing again, like children.

Isabel even managed to meet Will Caxton’s eyes when the wiry printer came to call. He’d brought a little posy for Jane. He’d scrubbed most of the blue stains off his hands. His bony, freckled face was a study in anxious solicitousness. “She’s got so thin,” he kept saying, after she’d come downstairs for a few minutes to thank him. “So pale.” Alice and Anne fed him and wouldn’t leave his side, so there was no real danger of unwanted confidences. But Isabel was grateful for his delicacy anyway; in the one moment she had been left alone with him, and he’d raised frank eyes to hers, he’d just patted her hand and said, “You must have been so worried,” and then, with great kindness, “You couldn’t possibly have thought this would happen. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

There were five days till Friday.

On Monday the contracts were given out for the vestments for King Richard III’s forthcoming coronation. After an hour of frantic pushing and shoving at Old Jewry, waiting for news of who would be assigned which task, peace descended on the markets. The mercers who’d got contracts retired to their workshops with satisfied looks on their faces to sew and cut and embroider round the clock. The others vanished indoors to hide their disappointment. The House of Claver, represented in the crush by Isabel, did well. There was one commission to supply cloth for the queen’s train. And Anne Pratte was asked, personally, to make three mantle laces of purple silk with tassels and buttons of the same stuff , mixed with Venetian gold thread, and another set of white rather than purple—one for the king and one for the queen.

Walking home, letting herself take plea sure in the moment, feeling proud of her business’s well- deserved reputation, Isabel happened upon one of the London Italians walking out of St.

Thomas of Acre. It was Dr. Gigli, portly and quivering in black velvet.

“Ah, it is Mistress Claver,” he said suavely. “I see from your face you have done well with the contracts.”

She smiled and bowed, remembering that Dr. Gigli was the physician who’d gone north with Dickon to treat his sickly nephew.

“Yes, we’ve been honored twice over,” she replied, with carefully mea sured professional boastfulness. “What a compliment to our silkwomen.”

He nodded and beamed back, asking with great charm for details.

Once the Claver commissions had been discussed to their mutual satisfaction, she turned to go. Then, as if suddenly remembering something, she added casually: “You’ve been traveling, I understand? You must be just back from Middleham?”

Dr. Gigli bowed. He was too much of a politician to look surprised at her knowledge. But he looked regretful as he raised his head. “A while ago now,” he said. “Two weeks.”

“I hope your patient is restored to good health?” she asked solicitously. “Young George Neville . . .”

Dr. Gigli lowered his head again. “Regrettably . . . ,” he murmured. He crossed himself.

So the boy had died. Isabel listened carefully. Dr. Gigli had thought his patient had nothing worse than an ague. He’d cupped him and prescribed a special diet, and young George Neville’s condition had seemed to improve. Until the evening when George Neville’s fever came back with a vengeance. He’d passed away by dawn.

“My lord Gloucester must have been distressed,” Isabel said sympathetically.

“Ah . . . but he did not hear at once . . . he was already on his way to London by the time it happened,” Dr. Gigli replied, like her, not quite calling Dickon “His Majesty.” There were no agreed names yet for the turmoil of the past few weeks. “I had to break the news to him here, myself, at Crosby’s Place, once I’d reached London. And that was only last Thursday . . . the day before . . .”

He hesitated, felt for the right phrase to describe the day of the change of power. Then he gave up, said helplessly, “all
that
,” and waved his fat ringed hands instead. “He was distressed, of course.

The boy was his blood, after all. But he had pressing affairs of state to consider too. When I heard, the next day . . .” he gestured again, “about . . . all
that
. . . I understood why he’d been in such haste.”

There was the beginning of a frown on Dr. Gigli’s well- padded brow. Something must have worried him about the way Dickon had received the news he’d have broken so diplomatically. But he composed himself. Smoothed down his black velvet over his paunch and smiled a full, superb smile in Isabel’s direction. “It was a long journey,” he added, then yawned magnificently, “and I am still a little travel- weary. Forgive me.”

With all the smiles and ceremoniousness she could muster, Isabel bowed him on his way.

But the doubt he hadn’t wanted to discuss dragged at her fragile new happiness. Like Dr. Gigli, she didn’t want to think about 3 what the story might mean. Still, she couldn’t stop herself wondering. Had the death of that boy, which had threatened Dickon’s landholdings in the North, been part of his decision, immediately afterward, to take the crown? She hurried home, not giving herself time to dwell on that thought.

On Tuesday morning a merry Goffredo took his Italian teams to Westminster, on foot. Their trunks and bags were going by river, but so many foreigners would attract attention on the wherries. It was safer to walk. Isabel was to join them at the silk house on Friday night. “We will cook you a magnificent dinner,
cara
,”

Goffredo promised.

For the rest of Tuesday and through Wednesday and Thursday, Isabel worked with Anne Pratte on the royal mantle laces for the coronation. “It will do you good to do something normal,”

Anne Pratte said, firmly, giving her the white set for the queen.

Isabel would rather have made the purple set Dickon was to wear.

But she submitted. It was something to do, to keep her from her thoughts. And Friday was almost here.

There was a palfrey tethered outside the Red Pale. She only really believed he’d be in the room once she’d seen it. She tiptoed upstairs, suddenly as quiet and shy as an innocent. He was sitting on the bed, reading his Book of Hours. He hadn’t seen her. She looked at him for a moment without moving, smiling with happiness.

A floorboard creaked. He looked up. She could see in the lightening of his eyes that he’d doubted she’d come. Hesitantly, she said: “I’m here.”

He opened his arms. She ran to him.

She lost herself for what seemed like hours in the beauty of their lovemaking. Joy filled her heart. His touch meant so much to her. . . .

“What are you thinking?” he murmured into her ear, when it was over, putting an arm over her chest. He was smiling, lazily.

She kissed him very tenderly on the mouth. She knew she had to ask. But a dreamy melancholy was settling on her even before she did. She knew the answer he’d give, too.

“When did you find out George Neville was dead?” she whispered.

She could imagine it so well: the chess move Dickon must have suddenly seen he could make. His masterstroke. Dr. Gigli mournfully bowing and scraping as he made his announcement, Dickon’s mind, razor- sharp, racing ahead to how his own northern lands were compromised by the child’s death. So full of the troubles facing him that he could hardly bring himself to acknowledge the fat Italian. Then realizing he had another young nephew in his hands, right here and now. Realizing there might be a quicker, more effective way of shoring up his position than struggling through layers of Woodvilles to beg for his royal nephew’s help. Thinking: Wouldn’t it be easier just to grab the big prize and stop bothering about the details?

Dickon’s eyes flickered. He knew she knew. Without moving, he said: “The day before . . .” Even he didn’t know what to call the day he’d seized power. He hesitated. She nodded. It was just as she’d thought.

He added hastily, “but that’s not why.”

But his eyes told a different story. They both knew it.

They went on staring at each other. Eons passed. I should go, she thought. Everything he’s told me has been a lie. Everything I suspected was true. He murdered Hastings deliberately, so he could steal power. Disgraced Jane. Maybe murdered his nephews too.

But she knew she wouldn’t go. And he knew too.

So there was no point in recriminations. The sadness in her eyes, and his, wasn’t farewell. It was an acknowledgment, on his part, of crimes he’d committed for power; and, on her part, that she didn’t care what he’d done as long as he was there. They were grieving, together, for the one victim of his coup on her heart: their lost innocence.

When she did, finally, get up and begin dressing, he watched from the bed.

“Will you come back?” he said, and his voice was humble.

Gently, she nodded.

She might try to tell herself later that there were sound practical reasons for her to stay with Dickon; she could even imagine trying to fool herself into believing she was just looking after her business by being here. But she knew that wasn’t why.

She’d looked into the depths of his soul. She hadn’t found it in her to recoil. How could she say no now?

Instead, hating the terrible joy she could feel crackling through her, she just muttered “Friday,” and slipped out into the burning summer afternoon.

CHESS

13

autumn 1483

"Health and wealth and happiness to us all!”

Alice Claver declaimed, making up in volume for what her voice lacked in clarity, and every cup in the room was raised to her in wobbly candlelight. There was a whisper of translation, then smiles.

It had taken till the end of summer, but the workshop was up and running. The dormitories were full. The cook-pots in the kitchen were bubbling with warm foreign- scented herbs now the harvest was in and Michaelmas approaching. No one in London had found the Clavers out as they spirited the Italians away downriver. And none of the neighbors in Westminster thought anything much of the new machines whirring next to Will Caxton’s, or the new foreigners groping their uncertain way round the streets. Thank God for Will Caxton, Alice thought, not for the first time.

The machines astonished her. Goffredo had risen magnificently to the occasion. As well as the looms, he’d also brought the two devices they’d talked about last year, the machines she’d heard were gaining popularity in Venice and saved untold amounts of labor. Both were giant wooden frames suspended from the ceil-ing. One contraption, if you wound it, could draw up dozens of strands of silk at once straight from the boiled silkworm cocoons and throw them, and another could reel dozens of thrown or twisted threads together ready for use. She’d never seen anything like either of them.

But Alice loved the looms best. Loved watching as the quiet younger brother of Gasparino di Costanzo, the master weaver, strung the first one up with its spiderweb of subtle gray and tan warps and tan and gray wefts, or as Gasparino’s thin dark hands flew between the complicated arrangements of strings and threads and bobbins, lifting, pushing, combing, until the cloth began to glow and flow with fantasy foliage. Gasparino and Alvise and Marino and their families couldn’t yet speak enough English to explain themselves except through signs, so Goffredo helped. “For this pattern,” he told Alice, who was always hungry for explanations, “you need three paired main warps and one binding warp; the main warps are a mixture of tan and gray silk, and we’ve used tan silk alone for the binding warp. The main wefts are the same mixture of gray and tan silk; and the pattern weft is pure tan silk.”

Alice nodded, fiercely trying to absorb the weave detail she didn’t need to learn for herself, just because she so loved the way the cloth came out. All she really needed to know was that Gasparino’s family was teaching one group of apprentices to make damasks; that Marino was in charge of lampas; and that Alvise was showing the third group the secrets of velvet. Isabel had chosen the Londoners for their deft fingers and, almost as importantly, their lack of family: Joan Woulbarowe (“Silkbarowe now!” the fool kept lisping excitedly through her black teeth); Katherine Arnold, who without parents in the business or capital to set herself up had been a servant in the silk business all her life; the throwster widows Agnes Brundyssch and Isabel Fremely, who wanted a change and a better- paid skill; and, of course, John Lambert’s onetime best employees, Jane Cotford, from Derby, Mary Fleet, from Southwark, and Ellen, the widow of William Lovell, a vintner fallen on hard times. Alice sighed; she knew that the most practical way to behave would be just to let Jane Cotford and Ellen Lovell fret about the technicalities of how to pattern the velvet—whether to void it right down to its satin ground, have the pile cut or uncut, or work with cut pile of two or three different heights to add interest and complexity to the pattern; or how many warp face satin threads you needed for the ground before the interruption; or the ratio of pile warp ends to main warp ends.

All Alice needed to do was marvel like a child at her dream coming true—to stare at the flying hands and muse, So this is how it happens. But it was the stubborn child in her that wanted to grab the shuttle and clack the frames and start learning to weave beauty for herself.

This dinner had been Isabel’s idea. They couldn’t get an Italian priest to bless the house, she’d argued, since he’d only go back and blab to the Lombard merchants; but they could all dine together as an extended family. Eat the Venetians’ basil- scented salads. Make the new families and the new apprentices feel part of a home. And have them show their talents to Alice and Anne and William, who only came occasionally to Westminster, leaving Isabel and Goffredo to manage the house, and to Will Caxton, who supported them in spirit by dropping in at all hours from his house next door. Isabel had said: “It needn’t be expensive. A couple of chickens and a piece of beef and some salads and a couple of fruit pies. It would be a symbol. A new start.” Quite right. Isabel was a good girl. She hadn’t started off that way, maybe; but this was what a good training did for a girl.